my experience regarding these anonymous ftp servers is they just check for
@ followed by some text and a dot in the email address. most of the ftp servers
will let you in even if the email address is wrongly formated, but suggest to
use something like "abc@domain.com" when visiting next time. CPAN was picky.
is it possible to check for the sanity of email address before sending so that
this problem will not occur and if it is not in rite format just format it

bbaetz:
-re: "no"... Uh, my point is: the user can fix the problem themselves. The
summary didn't say "the default value fails w/ some servers."
-re example.com: I guess it wouldn't hurt. what do IE and Comm do? (Does anyone
have a URL that guarentees that "example.com" will never be used for perpetuity?
I was just reading RFC 1630, which says:
FTP
The ftp: prefix indicates that the FTP protocol is used, as defined
in STD 9, RFC 959 or any successor. The port number, if present,
gives the port of the FTP server if not the FTP default.
User name and password
The syntax allows for the inclusion of a user name and even a
password for those systems which do not use the anonymous FTP
convention. The default, however, if no user or password is
supplied, will be to use that convention, viz. that the user name
is "anonymous" and the password the user's Internet-style mail
address.
Where possible, this mail address should correspond to a usable
mail address for the user, and preferably give a DNS host name
which resolves to the IP address of the client. Note that servers
currently vary in their treatment of the anonymous password.
In this light, it seems to me that we might want to have a radio button w/ more
sophisticated password settings (our default string, some address in an email
account you have configed, some reverse-lookup based address, or your custom string.
This might be yet another RFE, which I will create if you want to talk about
just editing this pref.
meanwhile, I've corrected the summary.
BTW, this pref name was not a great choice, can't we move it to "network.ftp.*"
before it is too late?

I'm not getting complicated, I'm just getting some standards advocacy in sideways :)
I didn't pick "mozilla@"... Heck, I never even thought it would work for a lot
of servers, but nobody ever objected until now...
What are our friends "IE and Comm" using?
re: <PROFILENAME> you pick that and mitchell probably have to get involved.

Actually picking a domain brainlessly can get you in a lot of trouble. Look at
http://www.localhost.com.
I checked, and "example.com" is not in DNS. I'd prefer to know it's reserved as
bogus, but you get to decide, all I'm here to do is verify :)

Created attachment 58946[details][diff][review]
ftp anonymous password
I send you a patch to correct ftp anonymous passwd.
There are three problems with the current approach:
- Some stupid servers try to check that what goes after @ exists
and delay the login and could deny login if the example.com
name goes down.
- Sending anything that's not anonymous@ as password is not anonymous
by definition
- Spyware is not a good idea, most users don't like it.
As more and more ftp clients are moving to this anonymous@ password
(for example the kde kio ftp, qt3, gnome-xml)
I recommend you to apply the patch.

No, we have to send a hostname - if we don't, then some sites won't let us in,
because its not a valid addess, which is why this bug was filed in teh first place.
>- Some stupid servers try to check that what goes after @ exists
> and delay the login and could deny login if the example.com
> name goes down.
example.com doesn't have a DNS entry, and never will, which is why its used. If
the root namesevers are timing out looking up that, the net is having much
greater problems.
Can you give an url for a server which denies access because example.com does
not exist?
>- Sending anything that's not anonymous@ as password is not anonymous
> by definition
this is the 'password', not the username. The username is 'anonymous', which is
the custom for this sort of thing (its not technically in any standard, but
people use it)
>- Spyware is not a good idea, most users don't like it.
How is this spyware?? The most it does is let another site know that you may be
using a mozilla based product, which is less that the useragent string or
navigator.appName gives you. We only send your real email address if you check
the box in preferences to do so.

> No, we have to send a hostname - if we don't, then some sites won't let us in,
> because its not a valid addess, which is why this bug was filed in teh first
place.
Can you give an url for a server which denies access because you don't
send a hostname?
It can't be invalid because IE sends "IEUser@". If a server denies access
when there isn't a hostname, it's denying access to half the requests !!!
> >- Some stupid servers try to check that what goes after @ exists
> > and delay the login and could deny login if the example.com
> > name goes down.
>
> example.com doesn't have a DNS entry, and never will, which is why its used.
If
> the root namesevers are timing out looking up that, the net is having much
> greater problems.
>
> Can you give an url for a server which denies access because example.com does
> not exist?
I know servers that check the hostname against DNS and delay login by
that amount of time.
> >- Sending anything that's not anonymous@ as password is not anonymous
> > by definition
> >- Spyware is not a good idea, most users don't like it.
>
> How is this spyware?? The most it does is let another site know that you may
be
> using a mozilla based product, which is less that the useragent string or
> navigator.appName gives you. We only send your real email address if you check
> the box in preferences to do so.
Why do you think sending the useragent string is a good idea ? It isn't.
Do you know sites that deny http requests if you are not using IE ?
Monopoly tried to do so in its portal.
If you send "mozilla@example.com" instead of "anonymous@"
apart from being a privacy leak you are helping sites to
discriminate based on user agent and no user wants that.
Would you at least consider using "anonymous@example.com" ?
(I prefer using "anonymous@" as it's used by some ftp clients like
kde kio ftp, qt3, gnome-xml, libnet-perl)

cpan does - see comment 0. Only one or two servers did it, and the dns entry
round robin's on where you are in the world, so you may not be able to reproduce
it. I managed from Montreal, though.
mozilla@ has been used for ages, and itcan be changed by the user.
Remarking as FIXED